Bill Gates, dressed casually in pale-yellow sweater and slacks, told the cheering audience that he had been a paper boy in his youth. He knew how to toss a paper. But almost immediately after he had picked up a hefty 36-page edition of the Omaha World-Herald and begun folding it, he changed his mind. The pre-folded paper lying next to it looked easier.
“Is this fair?” Gates asked the onlookers. He aimed for the porch of a model manufactured home that was set up inside the CenturyLink Center in Omaha. It was the first weekend of May 2015, and the basketball court inside the giant venue had been transformed into a showroom displaying the wares of dozens of companies owned by Berkshire Hathaway. The jamboree known as the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting was underway, and Gates and his friend Warren Buffett, the chairman and chief executive of the giant conglomerate, were slowly making their way through the throngs of adoring Berkshire shareholders, including dozens who were visiting from China.
Gates hoped to land his paper on the bull’s-eye marked on the front of the home, 35 feet away. Instead, the paper sailed in the air to the right and landed outside the porch. “That’s a [customer] complaint,” said a representative of Berkshire Hathaway Media Group, the company that housed the Omaha paper, which Buffett had bought in 2012.
“It’s easier without the steps,” Gates complained. “They do some homes without the steps.”
Buffett, who claimed to have delivered 500,000 papers as a kid, fared just as poorly. He threw a few papers, but they landed off the bull’s-eye. The two men moved on, posing for photos with eager shareholders, shaking hands, and strolling through the Berkshire empire on display.
Theirs was an unusual friendship. Buffett was folksy and outgoing, and never passed up an opportunity to crack a joke. He liked to speak in aphorisms. He enjoyed breaking down complex investing principles into simple nuggets that anyone could understand. When he met a new person, Buffett would be genuinely curious about their background. He asked them questions and listened intently, eyebrows furrowed, to the answers. Banter came to him easily. But Buffett was averse to conflict.
Gates, 25 years his junior, had a far different public persona. Everyone interviewed for this book who interacted with him—whether at a gathering, in the office, in small group settings, or during interviews—said he can be charming and engaging in the moment, but small talk and repartee are not his forte. He isn’t immediately interested in the person in front of him, but if you asked him a question, he might go on for minutes. Courtesies are lost on him. The journalist Ken Auletta likes to tell the story of how he paid a visit to Gates’s office once. Deep into the conversation, Gates reached into a mini fridge to grab a Diet Coke. He didn’t think to offer Auletta one.
Buffett and Gates had been friends since the summer of 1991, when they were introduced at a Fourth of July weekend gathering organized by Gates’s mother, Mary Gates, at Hood Canal. The family had long vacationed at the scenic, outdoorsy location with natural waterways and hiking trails about two hours from Seattle. Buffett was the guest of a friend, Meg Greenfield, then the editorial page editor of The Washington Post, in which Berkshire Hathaway was an investor at the time. Buffett was also close to Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Post and another friend of the Gates family.1 Mary had convinced her son to take time off his schedule to pay a visit. Planning to spend no more than a couple of hours, Gates came out by helicopter. When his mother wanted to introduce him to Buffett, he replied that he didn’t want to meet a “stockbroker.” But the two men hit it off immediately.2 Settling into a patterned couch, Buffett dressed in a red polo shirt and dark trousers, his left foot propped up against the coffee table, and Gates in a tennis outfit—shorts and a white shirt, his white socks coming up to mid-calf, his mop of hair tousled—they talked for eleven hours straight at that first meeting.3 Gates was surprised by the penetrating questions Buffett directed at him about the software business, and found himself warming to the avuncular midwestern billionaire. Each found the other’s view of the world “fascinating.” The other guests had to tear them apart. Once, recounting the story to students at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Gates called it an “unbelievable friendship.” Buffett quipped: “The moral of that is, listen to your mother.”
Despite the difference in ages, backgrounds, and lifestyles, the two billionaires forged a bond based on free-flowing conversation and a mutual love of bridge, business, problem-solving, and philanthropy. It was not unusual to see them golfing together at the annual Sun Valley conference. A few times a year, Gates would fly into Omaha on his private jet, making the pit stop on his way somewhere else to spend a few hours with his friend, who sometimes drove to the airport to pick Gates up. Gates, whose schedule was so tightly packed that he held meetings in five- and ten-minute slots, would block off time on his calendar to play online bridge with Buffett, whose days were far more fluid. One person with insight into their friendship said Buffett was enamored of his friend, viewing Gates in some ways as his intellectual heir, although to another person the friendship seemed “lopsided,” with the younger man eager to earn Buffett’s praise.
Buffett’s life has relatively few billionaire trappings. In response to a question about his wealth posed by this reporter in 2015, Buffett wrote: “In addition to the house in Omaha, I bought a house in Laguna Beach in the early 1970s for about $175,000. The entire family used this annually until Susie Sr.’s [Susan Thompson Buffett, his first wife] death; now used primarily by Susie Jr. [Susan Alice Buffett, his daughter] and friends. Last year I bought a $60,000 pontoon boat from Forest River [a Berkshire company] to be used by the family at Susie’s house at Lake Okoboji. I have a 6.25% interest in a Falcon 2000 operated by NetJets [another Berkshire company], having been a NetJets customer myself and for my family for about 20 years. And that’s about it.”4 Buffett has since sold the Laguna home. By contrast, Gates has a more traditional billionaire’s lifestyle, with multiple homes, planes, expensive art, and a big personal staff to oversee it all. The essence of their friendship, for Gates, was captured in a black-and-white photograph that sat in his office at his private firm Gates Ventures, a person who worked there recalled. Buffett is clearly in the middle of delivering a joke, and Gates has his head thrown back in laughter. Not an especially emotive person, his “laugh out loud” moments were often when he reacted to a Buffett joke, shrieking with joy.
In 2004, Gates joined the board of directors of Berkshire Hathaway, which Buffett described as an “act of friendship.”5 To do so, Gates had to step down from the board of Icos, the biotechnology company that developed Cialis and the only company other than Microsoft whose board he had been on. In his resignation letter to the Icos board, where he had been a director since 1990, Gates wrote that his decision had to do with “my interest in helping out in any way [Buffett] ever asks.” By then, Gates had stepped down as chief executive of Microsoft, although he remained its chairman. In March 2020, Gates said he would step down from the boards of both Berkshire and Microsoft to focus more on his philanthropy.
The performative aspects of their friendship, like the newspaper tossing contest in 2015, long delighted Berkshire shareholders, who made their pilgrimage to Omaha from around the world for the conglomerate’s annual meeting. One year, the duo handed out soft-serve ice cream from Dairy Queen—another Berkshire company—to shareholders. Sometimes, they played Ping-Pong or drove around in a golf cart. They usually walked side by side, Buffett in a suit and Gates in one of his trademark sweaters, mingling and chatting with shareholders. As attendees thronged Buffett, asking for selfies and autographs, Gates could often be seen standing off to the side, hands tucked under his armpits, happy to let the spotlight shine on his friend. Fans of Gates also couldn’t get enough of their friendship, and his media handlers used the opportunity to post short videos of the billionaire duo’s antics on Gates’s blog.
For decades, Buffett would host a brunch for a group of Berkshire friends and family, including shareholders, on the Sunday of the annual Berkshire meeting weekend. The venue was the Happy Hollow Club, a private country club started by a group of Omaha businessmen in 1907, with landscaped gardens, a golf course, tennis courts, and a dress code. In the 1990s, the group of invitees was small, about 60 or so people. Over the years, it swelled to about 300, nearly filling the club’s capacity. The attendees included a mix of Berkshire shareholders and executives, leaders of various companies, board directors, and other Buffett family members. Guests would pile up their plates with eggs, waffles, and bacon and walk over to find a table to sit at, mingling with others and waiting for a chance to say hello to Buffett.
One year, Lawrence Cunningham, a corporate governance expert and longtime Berkshire shareholder who regularly attended the brunch, found himself face-to-face with Gates. In 2016, Bayer, the pharmaceutical giant, had announced its intention to buy the agrochemical company Monsanto for $63 billion, and the acquisition had caught the attention of the financial and science press. Knowing his interest in agriculture given that it was one of the Gates Foundation’s focus areas, Cunningham brought up the deal. He could tell Gates was immediately engaged, launching into a discussion about the merits of agricultural equipment and seeds, and the social versus economic value that the companies contributed. “He’s a wonky dude, small talk is not his thing, but if you can get him engaged in an intricate business discussion, then he’s all over it,” Cunningham said. “You see it in his stage personality as well. He’s a software guy, an introverted personality, he’d rather sit and read. Warren is a stage performer, he’s sold everything, including the concept of Berkshire as an institution. Warren is the introvert’s dream because under his halo it’s safe.”
The New York Public Library stands in midtown Manhattan, a national historic landmark in front of which tourists linger, awestruck, even as office workers scurry by, inured to its majesty. Built in the Beaux arts style, with its tall columns and iconic lions sculpted out of pink Tennessee marble, the library opened in 1911. But on the morning of June 26, 2006, an unremarkable summer’s day in New York, the 200 or so philanthropy executives, reporters, and others gathered inside the marble-lined main hall of the library were riveted less by the building’s quiet magnificence and the striking murals on its ceilings than by the moment they were about to witness.
For days leading up to the event, the media had been buzzing. Invitations sent by Gates Foundation staffers had been cryptic, saying only that Buffett, along with Gates and French Gates, would be making an announcement. The day before, the journalist Carol Loomis, a longtime friend of Buffett’s, revealed a little by publishing an article in Fortune magazine explaining what the Omaha billionaire planned to do with his enormous fortune. Now, the audience was about to hear from Buffett himself. Shortly after 11 A.M., Buffett, who had flown in from Omaha for the press conference, dressed in one of the boxy suits he favored, got straight to the point. He had always intended to give 99 percent of his fortune, then estimated at $44 billion, to philanthropy, during his lifetime or upon his death. Now, he had identified the Gates Foundation as the biggest recipient of his generosity during his lifetime.
The world’s second-richest man at the time was handing over his money to the world’s richest man, entrusting him with the challenging, fraught, and complicated work of finding the right causes to give to. The symbolism of the location they had chosen for the announcement could hardly be overlooked. The New York Public Library has long stood as a testament to the harnessing of private dollars for the public good. It was built with contributions from the Astor, Tilden, and Lenox foundations. Later, the nineteenth-century steel magnate Andrew Carnegie would donate $5 million to set up a branch system around the main library. Today, its flagship midtown Manhattan building is named after Stephen A. Schwarzman, the billionaire cofounder of private equity behemoth Blackstone, who gave $100 million to the institution in 2008.
Years before their announcement, Buffett had presented his young friend with a copy of “The Gospel of Wealth” by Carnegie. In the essay, originally published in 1889 as a pair of articles in The North American Review, Carnegie explained that it was the duty of a wealthy man to give back to society. In the first article, Carnegie provided a moral defense of the wealth created by capitalism by arguing that everyone is better off under a market-based economy. A society in which individualism, private property, wealth accumulation, and competition are preserved is the “condition of affairs under which the best interests of the race are promoted, but which inevitably gives wealth to the few,” Carnegie wrote. In other words, unequal outcomes are the natural byproduct of the laws of capitalism, and even if it appeared unfair to individuals, it had to be accepted because it was beyond the power of people to alter, and because it was better than everyone being equally poor. After establishing his defense of capitalism and equating it with “civilization,” Carnegie turns to the question at hand: What is the proper mode of administering the wealth that has landed in the hands of a few?
He argued that to leave a fortune to one’s children is to “leave to my son a curse as the almighty dollar,” because it would destroy them. And to leave it to public use upon death is just a means of disposal and not an active use of the funds by the generator of the fortune. Carnegie thought it was a disgrace for a man to die rich. Instead, he wrote, it was the duty of the wealthy man to give back to society during his lifetime—not through taxes, not by making less, but through personal philanthropy. The “true antidote for the temporary unequal distribution of wealth, the reconciliation of the rich and the poor—a reign of harmony” is for the wealthy man to disburse his fortune. “They have it in their power during their lives to busy themselves in organizing benefactions from which the masses of their fellows will derive lasting advantage, and thus dignify their own lives.” He warns that giving money away indiscriminately or thoughtlessly would be akin to “almsgiving.” Rather, the benefactor must give money to those who would help themselves and in a way that uplifts the general condition of people.
“Thus is the problem of Rich and Poor to be solved,” Carnegie wrote. “The laws of accumulation will be left free; the laws of distribution free. Individualism will continue, but the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; entrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself. The best minds will thus have reached a stage in the development of the race… thoughtful and earnest men into whose hands it [the wealth] flows… by using it year by year for the general good.” His proposals caused a stir at the time because they were considered radical, but more than a century later, The Gospel of Wealth became the intellectual bedrock of much of the philanthropic giving by the wealthy. Carnegie put his own thinking into practice, donating not only to the New York Public Library, but also founding think tanks like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, one of the earliest examples of a modern private institution built for the public good.6
Although Buffett had long believed in the ideas of Carnegie, he had little interest in overseeing the disbursement of his own wealth. He liked to stay within what he called his “circle of competence,” arguing that a person shouldn’t assume that, because they’re good at one thing, they are good at everything. Rather, Buffett had hoped to leave the Berkshire fortune to his first wife, Susan, an abortion rights activist who ran their foundation, to give away, expecting that she would outlive him. But when Susan, who had been diagnosed with cancer, died suddenly of a stroke in July 2004 at the age of 72, Buffett, bereft and blindsided, was forced to revisit his philanthropic plans. His three children, Susan (known informally as Susie Jr.), Howard, and Peter, each had a foundation, but the entities were fledglings. The foundation that his deceased wife had run—called the Buffett Foundation before he renamed it the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation in her honor—was bigger, but not prepared to handle the billions of dollars he was ready to give away. At the same time, Gates had been paying more attention to the shape and structure of his philanthropy after quitting his job as chief executive of Microsoft in 2000. Buffett watched as his friend built an organization from the ground up that had already begun to reshape global philanthropy. By 2005, when he reflected on his own mortality in his annual letter to Berkshire shareholders and told them about his intention to give every Berkshire share that he owned to philanthropies, the solution to his conundrum was obvious, even if his decision was impulsive, according to several people who witnessed the events at the time. Once he had made up his mind, Buffett held multiple conversations with both Gates and French Gates about their work, their ambitions for the foundation, and whether they would be able to build out the infrastructure necessary to support the billions they would have to give away because of his annual gifts. It was only after he was satisfied with their long-term goals that Buffett took the momentous step. In doing so, Buffett was repurposing his business strategy to his philanthropy: Just as he picked businesses and investments for Berkshire based on the quality of the managers running them, Buffett was picking Gates to run his philanthropy for him. “What Warren has always done is find out who is the best at doing this, that, and the other, and get them to do it,” said Cunningham, the Berkshire shareholder and a professor emeritus at George Washington University. “When it came to philanthropy, that’s what he did too.” Cunningham described Buffett’s position as “I don’t know anything about malaria and I’m not gonna find out.”
That morning at the New York Public Library, Buffett outlined a complicated plan, which was premised on his faith that the value of Berkshire, the gigantic conglomerate he had built and whose success had made him an investing legend, would only keep rising. Rather than hand over his fortune all at once, Buffett created a formula that would allow him to give away far more over time, until he died. He explained clearly and methodically how it would all work. Berkshire had two classes of shares, A and B, and Buffett’s wealth was tied up in A shares. (At the time, a single A share was equal to 30 B shares, but following a stock split in 2010, one A share became equivalent to 1,500 B shares. The A shares can be converted to B shares, but not vice versa.) Buffett had earmarked 10 million B shares for the Gates Foundation, and smaller amounts for the four family foundations. In the first year, he would give the Gates Foundation five percent of those earmarked shares. Each year thereafter, the foundation would get five percent of the remaining shares. The bet, Buffett explained, was that even though he would be donating a diminishing number of Berkshire shares each year, they would appreciate enough over time that their dollar value—and thus the amount going to the foundation—would increase. Buffett was right: One A share of Berkshire traded on average at $95,000 in 2006. In 2023, a single A share was valued at more than half a million dollars—almost three times the median net worth of American families in 2022.7
Buffett’s gift to the Gates Foundation came with three conditions: One, that either Gates or French Gates would remain an active participant in the foundation. Two, that the funds that came from him each year had to qualify as charitable dollars rather than gifts, which are taxed differently. And three, that the value of his annual contributions had to be given away within the year, rather than sitting in the foundation’s endowment, in addition to the five percent of net assets that foundations are required to give away under tax law. Between 2006 and 2023, Buffett had given more than $39 billion to the Gates Foundation. By comparison, Gates and French Gates gave $39 billion between 1994 and 2022, including $22 billion to get their foundation going in 2000. In some years, the former couple gave the foundation less than half a billion. In 2021, they pledged $15 billion to the foundation’s endowment, and the following year, they transferred that money, as well as another $5 billion Gates contributed. “There is one not-very-well-known but incredibly important reason why the foundation has been able to be so ambitious,” Gates wrote on his blog in 2022. “Although it is named the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, basically half of our resources to date have come from Warren Buffett’s gifts.”8 As of 2023, the foundation’s annual activities had been funded in large part by Buffett’s gifts.
In the hoopla surrounding Buffett’s announcement in 2006, an important detail of his plan escaped attention: Although the investor had pledged 99 percent of his wealth to philanthropy, his commitment to the five foundations would stand only as long as he lived. Buffett, then seventy-five, said he would make separate plans for how to distribute the shares that remained after his death. Some months later, Buffett told Berkshire shareholders in his 2006 annual letter that he had stipulated in his will that all Berkshire shares that remained in his pocket when he died would have to be used for philanthropy within a decade of his death. (In 2021, two months shy of his ninetieth birthday, Buffett said he had reached only the midpoint of giving away all his Berkshire shares.) Only decades later would the broader implications of that lifetime pledge become an issue of significance for future funding at the Gates Foundation, the four Buffett family foundations, and the responsibilities of his three children. It would also come to strain Buffett’s friendship with Gates.
But on that summer’s day in 2006, as the journalists, nonprofits, philanthropists, television pundits, and academics discussed how the Gates Foundation would begin to spend those billions, the trio had already orchestrated a media blitz. They took out a front-page ad in The New York Times. They held another press conference at the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel. That evening, they went on the Charlie Rose show. At these appearances, Gates was by turns excited and enthusiastic about the possibilities the Buffett gift had unleashed. “We’re going to do our best to make sure it’s well spent,” he said, responding to questions from reporters on how the foundation planned to disburse the money. “We want to show people that philanthropy can be a lot of fun and it can have a lot of impact.” When Rose asked Buffett how he arrived at his decision, the billionaire said his thinking was straightforward. Wealth had no meaning unless it was translated into something, he said. Money had more utility to others than to him, so giving it away was the only logical option. “In big-scale philanthropy, it’s not the batting average that counts but the slugging percentage,” he said, borrowing from baseball terminology. A big foundation should aim for a high slugging percentage, meaning that it should gauge its success by the impact it makes rather than the number of projects it funds. Gates and French Gates were ideal leaders, he told Rose, because they had the stature and eloquence to inspire others into action. “Giving money away is easy, giving time is not,” Buffett said, adding that the duo’s hands-on approach went well beyond the involvement of Carnegie and Rockefeller in their philanthropic endeavors. Although Buffett wouldn’t be involved in the day-to-day decisions of how the money would be spent, he would join Gates and French Gates as a trustee. Until he stepped down from that position in 2021, he typically only attended the foundation’s annual meeting, but he served both as a silent partner and sounding board for Gates. After all, their legacies were forever intertwined.
When the Gates Foundation got its start in 2000, even Gates would probably not have told you that nearly a quarter of a century later, he and French Gates would have created an entity that can claim to have saved millions of lives, shaped the global public health agenda, and propelled the Microsoft cofounder to a level of renown and respect typically reserved for Nobel Peace Prize winners. Founded on the animating principle that “all lives have equal value,” a phrase dear to the former couple, the mission of the Gates Foundation is to fight poverty, disease, and inequity around the world, and “to create a world where every person has the opportunity to live a healthy, productive life.” Gates and French Gates called themselves “impatient optimists.” By 2005, the year before Buffett’s announcement, the foundation was already the world’s largest philanthropic organization of its kind, with an endowment of about $22 billion coming from Microsoft stock. But its framework and their ambitions—which the Buffett money would help unleash—were still in the making. In the years following the Buffett gift, the foundation scrambled to build a far bigger chassis that could accommodate the giant waves of money that were about to hit their shores annually and effectively give away many more billions of dollars. In 2006, it gave away about $1.6 billion; by 2009, it projected it would have to make $3.2 billion worth of grants per year.
In 2008, Gates gave up his day-to-day role at Microsoft, although he remained chairman of its board until 2014. And with their children going to school, French Gates had more time on her hands to get involved in the foundation’s affairs. Suddenly, the two of them were walking around the foundation’s offices several days a week, taking a much deeper interest in the various programs that it was making grants to, and directing its next phase of growth. Their hands-on involvement at least partly reflected the tremendous pressure Gates and French Gates felt to live up to the faith that Buffett had placed in them. Between 2007 and 2010, the Gates Foundation had the messiness of a rat’s nest and the pace of a weed’s growth. It hired people at a frenetic pace; the employee count went from 300 to roughly 1,500. Its new hires included academics, policymakers, experts in international development, and communications advisors. They joined to expand the foundation’s programs, defining new strategies and foci in global health, agriculture, and development.
Prabhu Pingali, a professor at Cornell University, joined the Gates Foundation in 2008. Pingali, who worked at the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization in Rome at that time, recalled a visit from foundation executives who wanted a crash course on agriculture, and to see if there was a unique role for philanthropy in farming. He ended up providing an overview of the dynamics of global agricultural development, including food prices, biotechnology, farming practices, and more, and eventually moved over to the foundation. When he joined the agricultural development team, there were 15 people, Pingali said. When he left in 2013, there were 80. Mark Suzman, a former journalist and official at the United Nations, also joined the foundation around 2007 to build out its global development program and set up offices around the world. In 2020, Suzman became the foundation’s fourth chief executive. Many experts who joined during that burst of growth said that a big part of their job, in addition to determining programs and strategies, was to educate the former couple about the complexities of international development, education, financial literacy, and agriculture. These were relatively new areas of focus where data was often patchy, and knowledge of local contexts was essential to understanding why philanthropic approaches needed to be more flexible and fluid from region to region.
To house the new hires, the foundation, which had been operating out of a patchwork of five office buildings, began constructing a new campus in 2008. The campus, which became operational in 2011, is built on what was once a contaminated, 12-acre parking lot. Located across from a cluster of Seattle attractions including the iconic 605-foot Space Needle building, and a museum and garden that house Dale Chihuly’s vivid glass sculptures, the campus has 900,000 square feet of office space. It was built at a cost of $500 million, $350 million of which came from the Gateses’ personal account. Its two boomerang-shaped office buildings, which house about 1,800 people, are visible from atop the Needle. The foundation takes pride in the buildings’ energy-efficient construction; each building has a green roof with mechanisms to harvest more than one million gallons of rainwater. The original plan was for there to be three buildings, but they settled on two after Buffett advised restraint, one former employee who was present during that time said. The foundation had come a long way from its early days, when it operated out of a small, one-room office above a pizza restaurant with about a dozen people.
The media scrutiny was intense. Senior reporters and columnists, curious about the foundation’s plans and its frenzy, began calling. The work had become overwhelming for the handful of people on the communications team, who often took days to clear up the backlog of reporter calls. Initial publicity efforts were piecemeal and more reactive than strategic, and geared toward highlighting the work of its grantees. But with all the changes, it became evident that the foundation needed a clearer and more proactive communications strategy. Over a two-year span, the number of media professionals increased from around eight people to about 80. They set about commissioning polls to get a sense of the best approach. It appeared that people wanted to hear from Gates rather than from program officers who were overseeing individual strategies, or the nonprofits on the ground who received foundation grants. That did create some frustration among people inside the foundation who felt that their programs, which needed their own communications to help get the word out, were starved of attention because of the focus on the two individuals, and because Gates and French Gates didn’t have the time to promote every line of activity the foundation was working on.
Today, the foundation’s resources dwarf those of the Ford Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and other big global foundations. Its annual budget exceeds that of the World Health Organization (WHO). Not unlike an undulating octopus, the Seattle-based organization has its tentacles in a variety of global issues, from vaccines and public health to agricultural development and food security, from poverty alleviation and sanitation to gender equality and digital accounts for the unbanked. With offices scattered across the globe and a presence in 130 countries, it has built an enormous—and sometimes invisible—network of ties with governments, multilateral institutions, corporations, countries, universities, and nonprofits. That allows the foundation to act as an influential go-between among various parties. The foundation has largely decided to shoulder the burden of sustaining and improving the sometimes chaotic global infrastructure of public health and development, by creating new alliances and propping up old ones, providing funds for research into cures for overlooked diseases, and lending its experts to help shape policy. Its way of doing things has cemented “big” or institutionalized philanthropy as distinct from the passive and ad hoc charitable giving long practiced by individual wealthy donors.
In 2019, the foundation—whose influence, size and practices had already invited criticism—took an even bigger hit to its reputation when the news emerged, just weeks after Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell, that Gates had met with the convicted sex offender and pedophile several times. Gates clarified that he had met Epstein purely to discuss philanthropy, and that he was sorry for his poor judgment. Less than two years later, in May 2021, Gates and French Gates announced their divorce. The following month, Buffett said he would step down as the third co-trustee of the Gates Foundation, adding that there was no reason for him to stay in the role but that his pledged gifts would continue. “My goals are 100% in sync with those of the foundation, and my physical participation is in no way needed to achieve those goals,” he said in a statement. Buffett added that Suzman, who had been appointed chief executive in 2020, was an “outstanding recent selection who has my full support.” In July 2021, Gates and French Gates made their $15 billion commitment to the foundation’s endowment. In January 2022, the foundation created a new board of trustees to improve its corporate governance practices, and to bring fresh perspectives that would inform the next phase of its growth. In a blog post that year announcing that the Gates Foundation would spend $9 billion a year by 2026, Gates expressed his gratitude to his friend. “Warren, I can never adequately express how much I appreciate your friendship and guidance as well as your generosity.”9
Although civil, the public statements, taken together, contained a sense of an ending, as though viewers of the long theater of a friendship and a world-changing philanthropic partnership were witnessing the final act. And Buffett was, in fact, reminding the world—and in particular the employees and new trustees of the Gates Foundation—that the lifetime pledges he had made in 2006 could come to an end anytime given his age, and that they shouldn’t count on Berkshire billions in making long-term funding plans, according to several people with knowledge of Buffett’s motives. During Thanksgiving week in 2022, as many Americans scattered across the country for the annual feast with family and friends, Berkshire Hathaway put out a regulatory filing disclosing that Buffett would donate more shares to his four family foundations. He had already increased his gifts to his children’s foundations once before, in 2012. The following Thanksgiving, Buffett put out a news release announcing another round of gifts to the four entities. “They supplement certain of the lifetime pledges I made in 2006 and that continue until my death (at 93, I feel good but fully realize I am playing in extra innings).”
He also spelled out the plan for the Berkshire shares that would be impossible to give away during his lifetime, given that he had only hit the midpoint in 2021. Valued at around $100 billion in 2023, those shares would be placed into a trust. His three children would be the co-trustees, and they would have a decade after their father’s death to disburse those funds to charity. There was no mention of the Gates Foundation. Buffett’s children are unanimous that none of the remaining shares will go to the Gates Foundation, according to people aware of their thinking. Always deliberate with his language, Buffett emphasized the word “lifetime” to avoid any miscommunication or confusion about which philanthropies stood to get his money, partly because there was a longstanding assumption within the Gates Foundation that it would always get Buffett’s money, three of the people said. In a footnote to its combined financial statements for 2022 and 2021 that was released in May 2023, the Gates Foundation Trust, which manages the endowment for the foundation, noted for the first time that the Buffett money would no longer come in after his death. “As this gift is conditional and applies only during his lifetime, its receipt cannot be assured in advance of each year’s installment of the gift,” the note said. “After his death, Mr. Buffett’s executors will direct the disposition of his assets.”
There were other factors that strained their friendship. For more than a decade, Buffett—known for his love of lean and efficient operations free of bureaucracy—had been bothered by what he saw as the foundation’s bloat and inflated operating costs, a fact that was well-known in the philanthropic community. The foundation had settled into a groove and even become complacent, he told staffers, which reduced its appetite for taking the kinds of risks that could lead to more effective philanthropy, and that he had hoped his donations would be used for. He was also upset by comments relayed to him by others who had found Gates rude and condescending, according to multiple accounts. Buffett had long offered Gates advice on how to be a friend. Be aware of how your closest friends think of you, Buffett would tell Gates, and be good to them. When this reporter suggested to Buffett in April 2024 that Gates’s “genuine ‘laugh out loud’ moments are when he’s around you,” Buffett chose to reply in the past tense: “We have had a huge number of laughs together and he has a keen sense of humor,” he wrote. At the same time, Gates, who has posted at least one goofy video of him and Buffett every year on his GatesNotes blog since it launched in 2010, did not write a single entry solely about his friend in 2021, 2022, or 2023. In previous years, his team would also post at least one video of the two from the Berkshire annual meeting or other events where they spoke together. In his last post dedicated to Buffett, in 2020 during the pandemic, Gates filmed himself in an apron baking an Oreo cookie cake for his friend’s ninetieth birthday. The two remain friends and talk on the phone—Alex Reid, a Gates spokeswoman, said that they speak “as frequently (if not more frequently) than they ever have”—and Gates still visits Buffett in Omaha occasionally, but Buffett typically does not initiate the outreach, two of the people said, although they added that Buffett has minimized all his interactions given his advanced age. Speaking of the friendship between the two, another person said: “All tea leaves point to disturbance in the mythology.”
Ted Turner was a bit of a public scold in the 1990s. At the beginning of that decade, the brash and outspoken media mogul and billionaire founder of CNN had embraced philanthropy in a big way, starting with the creation of the Turner Foundation in 1990. In September 1997, the United Nations Association of the United States of America, a nonprofit tied to the U.N., recognized his contributions by honoring him with their global leadership award. The U.N. had been under enormous financial strain for some time, and it was on Turner’s mind when he announced at the event that he would pledge $1 billion to the multilateral organization to support its various programs, from cleaning up land mines to helping refugees. As one of the largest donations from an individual at the time, Turner’s move made front-page news. That evening, Turner also vowed to raise more funds for the international agency. And he used the pulpit to bully other mega-rich individuals into giving more to charity. “Everyone who’s rich in the world can expect a call from me,” he told the black-tie crowd gathered at New York’s Marriott Marquis hotel.10
It wasn’t the first time Turner had tweaked other billionaires for not doing enough on the philanthropic front. In 1996, he proposed creating an “Ebenezer Scrooge Prize” for the most tight-fisted billionaires. In particular, he picked on Gates and Buffett, then the richest and second-richest individuals in the world, calling them “skinflint” billionaires for not giving their money away. “They are fighting every year to be the richest man in the world,” he told the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. “Why don’t they sign a joint pact to each give away a billion and then move down the Forbes list equally?”11
In the summer of 2010, Gates and Buffett went one step further, inviting other billionaires to commit publicly to giving away at least half of their wealth to charitable causes during their lifetimes or in their wills. The highly publicized pressure campaign, called the Giving Pledge, was meant to get the billionaire class thinking more deeply about philanthropy. The idea had come about after a small group dinner for about seven couples in 2009 hosted by David Rockefeller.12 As they went around the table, each guest or couple talked about their philosophy of giving. Many in the group knew each other only glancingly, but they took comfort in their shared status and spoke in a spirit of candor, sharing stories about their families, how their parents had influenced their attitude toward charity, and the problem of how much to leave their heirs. It took two hours to go around the table.
Even before the Giving Pledge, the tie-up between Buffett and Gates had already roused a lot of interest among other billionaires, many of whom reached out to the foundation wondering if they too could give their money to its endowment. Inspired by the chord they had struck, the trio, including French Gates, tossed around ideas of how they could get the broader billionaire community to make better plans for their philanthropy. In particular, Buffett, who would soon enter his eighth decade, wanted to get more people thinking about how to give their money away when they were younger and their thinking was clearer, rather than toward the end of their lives when their decision-making abilities might be diminished.
Gates and Buffett borrowed heavily from the philanthropic ideas of Charles Feeney, an Irish American who had made his fortune building the global network of Duty Free Shoppers (DFS), the airport stores where passengers could buy Scotch whisky, a Swiss watch, or a bottle of French perfume while waiting to board an international flight. Feeney, who had set up his foundation, the Atlantic Philanthropies, in 1982, had popularized the concept of “giving while living.” When the world came to know about his philanthropy in 1997, scorekeepers of wealth had to revise their estimates quickly; the man whose net worth they had pegged in the billions had assets of about $5 million.13 It wasn’t that their calculations were wrong. Feeney had indeed been a billionaire once. But since 1982, he had been stealthily and steadily climbing down the ladder of wealth by earmarking more and more of his DFS shares for charity. There were no press releases announcing his donations. His name wasn’t on the door of a building. He made grants through the Atlantic Philanthropies, to which his name was not publicly tied. Universities and nonprofits that received his money were often told the gifts came from a group of wealthy clients. He established General Atlantic, a private equity firm, to manage his investments and fund his philanthropic activity; as a so-called limited partner in the firm, he could cloak his identity. Anonymity was so important to Feeney that his representatives sometimes paid by cashier’s check. He set up his foundations in ways that would minimize regulatory disclosures. Feeney was required to reveal his philanthropic activities in 1997 when Möet Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH), the global luxury giant, bought DFS. In 2002, Feeney said he would spend down his foundation’s assets by 2016. By the time the Atlantic Philanthropies ended its grant-making that year, hitting its target, it had given out $8 billion. By 2020, it had shut its doors. Feeney, then 90, had achieved his goal of “giving while living.” He died in 2023. Gates has said of Feeney: “Chuck has been a beacon to us for many years; he was living the Giving Pledge long before we launched it.”14
Buffett and Gates conducted what was essentially a get-out-the-vote campaign to mobilize other billionaires to sign the pledge. Buffett encouraged people to write letters addressing how they had arrived at their decision, arguing that written pledges were important for the historical record, and because they might inspire future generations to think about philanthropy the same way Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth had inspired him and Gates. To those who were resistant, he gently suggested that there was little point in taking their money with them to the coffin. The software billionaire Larry Ellison said he took the pledge simply because Buffett had personally asked him to do so. Gates took a different approach to draw billionaires into the philanthropic circle. He and French Gates hosted dinners with small groups of wealthy people around the country, typically no more than a dozen, to gauge their interest in signing the pledge. If some seemed interested, Gates would follow up with a call and provide more details about the mechanics.
In talking about the pledge, Gates doffed his cap to Turner, although he cast philanthropy as “fun” rather than an obligation. “Ted Turner started that by scolding people,” he said once. “We’re trying to complement that by showing people how much fun it can be.” If the intention of the Giving Pledge was noble, its timing was fortuitous. The financial crisis of 2008 had ravaged the economy, plunging it into the Great Recession. People were seething at Wall Street’s greed, which they held directly accountable for the housing crisis and ensuing mess. Top earners had come in for personal attacks in a world that felt fundamentally inequitable, with rising student debt, out-of-control healthcare costs, and taxes that appeared to benefit the wealthy. The Occupy Wall Street movement was still a year away, but it would come to symbolize the growing frustration of people who had no way of holding the wealthy accountable for their actions. Against the background of that simmering resentment, the Pledge campaign scored some publicity points, even if others cynically called it little more than an image management stunt for billionaires.15
The initial group of 40 signatories included billionaires from around the country, with the majority coming from California and New York. By the end of 2010, 17 additional billionaires or billionaire couples, including Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, had signed the pledge. The pledge was originally limited to U.S. billionaires but opened to global billionaires in 2013. As of 2023, 243 billionaires had signed the pledge—a substantial number but still only a fraction of the world’s 2,600 billionaires. A large number are from the United States, but there is a growing contingent from other countries with an emerging billionaire class, including India and China. There were a couple of years when the pledgers numbered more than two dozen, but on average, there have been 15 signatories a year. In 2023, there were only seven pledgers; in 2022, there were five—the lowest numbers since the campaign began.
Their letters, carefully worded and posted for all to see on a website dedicated to the Giving Pledge, follow a similar pattern, in keeping with the guidance Buffett had initially provided about the themes to address. Some billionaires describe how they got their start and built fortunes beyond their wildest dreams, and how they hoped to make the world a better place by giving it away. Others highlight the role of a good education, opportunity, and hard work in building their riches, and the responsibility they feel to give back to society. They express gratitude, underscore the importance of values, occasionally acknowledge their privilege, nod to those who helped along the way, reflect on what led to their decision and what they hope to direct their philanthropy to. Often, the letters are as humble as the talk is lofty. Some of the letters have the feel of an acceptance speech. Many of them speak in the jargon of business, of investing their dollars in innovative solutions and building platforms for giving. There are sprinklings of billionaire hubris—the idea that they have been handed gifts of talent that should be used to improve the lot of others. Many letter writers strike a self-aggrandizing note when describing their generous intentions; Taylor Swift may as well have been referring to them in her song lyric, “Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism like some kind of congressman?” They call philanthropy fun, fulfilling, worthwhile, and an experience of pleasure unlike any other.
“Everyone is dealt a group of cards at birth,” Nicolas Berggruen, the investor once known as the “homeless billionaire” because he had no fixed address, wrote in his six-sentence letter. “What one does with them is up to each one of us; and the sum of those choices, constitute our lives.” In his letter, David Rubenstein, a cofounder of the private equity giant Carlyle, wrote that he had already committed to giving most of his wealth away before Gates talked to him about signing the pledge. He agreed to sign it, Rubenstein wrote, because he hoped that the publicity around it would encourage all Americans—not just the wealthy ones—to give more. “And if every person with the ability to make some philanthropic gifts does so, the country will be much better for these gifts, and the donor will surely feel much better about himself or herself,” Rubenstein wrote, with patriotic flourish. Many other Wall Street billionaires also took the pledge. Bill Gross, the bond fund manager who cofounded PIMCO, wrote his 2020 letter by hand, explaining how he initially resisted signing, but his thinking had evolved over time. “I have evolved/aged.” Feeney, whose philanthropy had served as an inspiration for the Giving Pledge, wrote a letter in 2011 although he had already given much of his wealth away by then. He encouraged billionaires not just to give money away, but to also “fully engage in sustained philanthropic efforts during their lifetimes.” Turner, also among the original group of signatories, wrote about how his father’s actions, including supporting the education of two African American students at his alma mater in the 1950s, instilled in him the value of charitable work. Turner then claimed a bit of the credit for, as he wrote, “putting other people on notice” when he first called on others to give more, way back in 1997.
Taken together, the letters provide a collective view of how billionaires would like the world to perceive them as philanthropists: thoughtful, grateful, and generous. Not a single letter mentions the tax benefits of charitable donations, or the reputational bump provided by highly publicized giveaways. For the most part, the letters don’t address questions about systemic inequalities that create hurdles to achievement, or the conditions that allowed them to accumulate so much wealth in the first place, focusing instead on the role of individual opportunity, good education, and hard work.
“The explanations recorded remain within a realm of what signatories may consider a socially desirable account of their generosity,” Hans Peter Schmitz and Elena M. McCollim write in their 2021 study of the Giving Pledge letters.16 The authors call it a tale of good intentions with no ability for others to follow through on whether anything has been delivered.
In the more than thirteen years since the Giving Pledge was launched with much fanfare, the public conversation around economic inequality has only become more trenchant and the exponential increase in billionaire wealth has come in for particular scrutiny. The biggest question is whether the achievements of the pledge—essentially a movement by the wealthy for the wealthy—should be assessed, and if so, how. From the beginning, Buffett, Gates, and French Gates clarified and defended the pledge as no more than an ethical and moral commitment, the goal of which was to prompt billionaires to think more systematically about giving and engage with their ilk to learn about approaches to philanthropy. The website of the Giving Pledge underscores that it is not legally binding, and it is not a platform that holds people accountable to their words. The campaign is also clear that it does not track whether billionaires have in fact given their money away. Its deliberately fuzzy and open-ended nature has invited criticism for leaving pledgers with a lot of wiggle room. (Notably, Buffett is one of the few billionaires who laid out his plan in full detail.)
The pledge deserves scrutiny at the very least because of the free publicity it generates for billionaires who sign on, with no way to test if they have followed through on their commitment or assess its impact on the ground, even as it has become something of a rite of passage for billionaire philanthropy. For starters, the pledge does not specify whether “half of one’s wealth” should be measured at the point when a billionaire wrote their letter, or when the person starts to give money away, or if it’s an average of the two, or a changing target. The question becomes meaningful given the rise of billionaire wealth. At the end of 2022, the collective net worth of the top 10 American billionaires who had signed the pledge was more than $720 billion. Collectively represented, the net worth of the same 10 individuals at the time they signed the pledge was roughly $150 billion. In other words, the amount billionaires pick to give away would differ significantly based on what the cutoff point for net worth is.17
Buffett addressed the issue in 2021 when he announced that year’s gifts to the five foundations. The total amounts he gave to philanthropy, at the moments he chose to give them over the years (with instructions that the money be spent in short order), added up to $41 billion. Had he waited until June 2021, when he wrote the letter, to give the same money away, it would have been $100 billion.
“Would society ultimately have benefitted more if I had waited longer to distribute the shares?” He acknowledged the complexity of the question but said those were decisions each donor had to make individually. “Deciding when to switch from building philanthropic-destined funds to depleting them involves a complicated calculation based on the nature of the assets involved, family matters, the seldom-confessed instinct to not ‘let go’ and a host of other variables. One size definitely does not fit all.”18 It is also a rich irony that despite the billions of dollars that many have earmarked for philanthropy, many have not slipped down the billionaire list; their money is coming in much faster than it is going out the door.19 The rise in wealth has invited more incisive criticism.
Wealth-X, which tracks the wealth of the world’s richest people, has estimated that $600 billion had been pledged as of 2020. That might sound like a lot, but headline numbers like that can be misleading because there is very little public data—not to mention scant details in the letters—about how much of those earmarked funds have made their way to the nonprofits and other direct recipients that can immediately put the money to work. Foundations are required to give away at minimum 5 percent of their assets every year to maintain their tax-exempt, charitable status. Dollars directed to a billionaire’s private foundation are counted as philanthropic dollars for tax purposes. Many billionaires also put money into donor-advised funds, which allows the giver to get the charitable tax benefits immediately, without imposing a time frame within which the money has to be disbursed, allowing money to sit in foundation endowments and donor-advised funds in perpetuity, doing little good in the world.
Aaron Dorfman, who leads the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog organization, said that’s exactly what has happened; to the extent that dollars can be traced from a pledger to the nonprofit world, not much of it has actually moved. Instead, a big chunk of the money pledged is lodged in foundations or inside donor-advised funds, he said. An outspoken critic of the Giving Pledge, Dorfman allowed for the fact that the practice of philanthropy has gotten more sophisticated in the past decade or so. But he took the view that the Pledge campaign, in a sense, has acted as a “release valve” for pressure that might otherwise result from public policy changes that would prevent people from getting wealthy in the first place. “If we have this sense in the society that most billionaires are going to give money away, then we don’t have to change policy to get them to do it.”
A 2020 study of the Giving Pledge by the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank, pointed out another loophole: As billionaire wealth has grown, the charitable deductions billionaires can take has also increased in absolute dollars. Hypothetically, the study said, that could represent a hole of hundreds of billions of dollars of lost tax revenue for the government, which would have to be filled by the rest of the country’s income earners.
Pledge or not, the massive wealth accumulation has created another problem: How to give? Giving money away takes time, work, and creativity. It’s one thing to set up a foundation and quite another to build the infrastructure and carry out the due diligence to give the money away wisely and effectively. David Friedman, who cofounded Wealth-X, a platform that sells data to companies that target the ultrawealthy, said that when the Giving Pledge was announced and a lot of people committed to it, they didn’t really think about the implementation side of things. As a result, Friedman said, the Giving Pledge is “basically stalled.”
Signatories of the pledge whose donations can be tracked appear to have given much of their money to traditional causes, including university endowments and research, rather than toward big transformative social change. Some of the richest Americans, including Bezos, Ballmer, Page, and Brin, had sidestepped the Giving Pledge as of 2023, although each engages in some philanthropy. Nike’s Phil Knight and Starbucks’ Howard Schultz were also among those who didn’t feel the need to join the club, or have Gates tell them to give their money away, according to a consultant on philanthropy who has direct insight into the matter. Yet others intend to be charitable, but don’t want to be held accountable by signing the pledge, in case they change their minds. Thus, the loopholes of the Giving Pledge are so numerous as to make it almost meaningless.
Those more sympathetic to the impetus for the pledge say it should be measured not in terms of the actual philanthropic outcomes, but rather on the fact that it shone a spotlight on the need for giving and caused people to think about what they wanted to do with their wealth. Buffett’s message that it was better to give money away during your lifetime than leave it all to your children resonated with a lot of potential donors. It also resonated with multimillionaires—the thousands of people with tens or hundreds of millions sitting around.
The Giving Pledge has fed the growth of the philanthropic advisory industry in the past decade or so, because many wealthy people who want to be generous and think beyond donating to their alma maters or hospitals and research centers don’t know where to start. Philanthropic advisors and those who manage the investments of billionaires through private firms called family offices, say their industry has gotten much better at helping people understand how to do a better job of giving money away. They say they are providing a professional service that helps the wealthy build foundations and identify the best-run nonprofits where their donations can make the most impact.
“I was skeptical about how much the Giving Pledge would do, but it has fostered collaborative giving,” said Joel L. Fleishman, the Duke University professor who has studied the campaign closely. “Those who have signed the pledge have regular meetings, not only with other principal donors but also their children,” he said. “Other institutions such as Indiana University tried to bring wealthy individuals together for confidential sessions but never succeeded in doing it. The few members of the Giving Pledge I know have told me with considerable enthusiasm that they get to talk with the big givers, and they value it.”
Over time, the pledge has become a resource for billionaires looking for ways to “do” better philanthropy. There is an annual two-day conference hosted by the organization that was set up to run the Giving Pledge campaign, at which billionaires and their representatives come together to discuss themes, exchange ideas, and strategize with philanthropy experts about the most effective methods of giving. Signatories also attend group meetings where they can build new networks and exchange ideas and tips on what has worked and what has failed. In 2022, Gates and French Gates both attended the conference—held in Ojai that year—and reaffirmed their commitment to philanthropy.20 At learning sessions held throughout the year, pledgers are schooled by experts on poverty alleviation, education reform, and other potential areas of giving. Pledgers have even visited the White House to discuss ways in which governments and philanthropists can collaborate.
One person who has attended these meetings on behalf of a Giving Pledge signatory said the gatherings felt like events where billionaires could discuss problems specific to their class without fear of being judged. The topic of how much money to leave one’s children came up frequently. But billionaire participants also shared tips about juggling multiple homes, maintaining staff, and coordinating the lives and schedules of family members as they crisscrossed the world for work and leisure. Those in the philanthropic advisory business also say that the Giving Pledge has had a bigger impact on billionaires outside the United States than they expected. Melissa Berman, who launched Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, a nonprofit, in 2002 and stepped down from it in early 2024, observed that many of the international givers saw the pledge as part of a global club they wanted to belong to, a certain signaling comparable to being a regular at the World Economic Forum in Davos, or at the ground level, the way people might wear a sticker that said, “I donated blood.” She has even encountered those who would exaggerate their net worth to be able to sign the pledge. The most measured assessment of the impact of the Giving Pledge came from Buffett himself. “There’s been more money that has been contributed by the members than they otherwise would have contributed though this is impossible to measure,” he wrote via email. “Bill has helped materially to change the culture of giving in many countries and continues to do so whenever he travels. I did my share the first couple of years but Bill has carried the load ever since.” Although there was no grand plan when he, Gates, and French Gates launched the initiative, Buffett said, “it has worked out better than I anticipated and has made a definite contribution to philanthropic thinking around the world.”